Happy Sunday, all! Sorry I've been so absent from the blog lately. I've had a tough time recovering from my recent travels, and I've been a bit under the weather to boot. This weekend, I did finally manage to make it through all of the blog posts in my reader (though some amount of skimming was required). Here are a few (mostly from this past week - everything older than that started to feel like old news):
There are too many wonderful interviews from this week's Winter Blog Blast Tour for me to highlight them all. But I did especially enjoy Shelf Elf's interview of Laini Taylor, as well as 7-Imps' interview of Laini's husband, Jim Di Bartolo. Their daughter Clementine Pie is adorable. You can find the complete set of links to the WBBT interviews at Chasing Ray (home of WBBT organizer Colleen Mondor). See also Liz B's background piece on the WBBT at Tea Cozy. I also enjoyed Mary Ann Scheuer's interview with Annie Barrows, which included tidbits about Annie's reading with her own kids.
Speaking of Laini and Jim, they did not, alas, win the National Book Award for Young People's Literature (for which Lips Touch was shortlisted). Kudos to the winner, Phillip Hoose, for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, a true-life account of the 15-year-old African-American girl who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in March 1955.
The Cybils nominating committee panelists are reading away. And Cybils tech guru Sheila Ruth reports at Wands and Worlds that "Tracy Grand of Jacketflap has once again created this terrific Cybils nominee widget. It rotates through the Cybils nominees and displays a different one each time the page is loaded. You can get the widget for your own blog here." See also Sheila's post at the Cybils blog about publisher love for the Cybils, and our thanks to the many publishers and authors providing review copies for the Cybils process. Sheila has been doing an amazing job as this year's Publisher Liaison.
Betsy Bird also links to various write-ups about the recent Children's Literary Cafe at the New York Public Library (focused on the Cybils).
Posts about holiday gift-giving are already proliferating. I especially liked this Semicolon post with book ideas for eight and twelve-year-old girls, and this post at The Miss Rumphius Effect with gifts for readers and writers. Elaine Magliaro also has a fabulous list of Thanksgiving-related resources at Wild Rose Reader.
Pam shares the results of the KidLitCon09 charity raffle at MotherReader. She says: "With more than five hundred dollars raised with the charity raffle at KidlitCon, we gave two projects at Donors Choose a huge boost. Now with additional contributors, both DC school literacy projects have been fully funded!" She shares teachers' notes from both programs.
I've seen a couple of responses to Betsy Bird's article about Amazon's Vine program. Maureen has some excellent thoughts at Confessions of a Bibliovore on what it means to review in a professional manner, whether on a blog or not. Roger Sutton from Read Roger, on the other hand, just thinks that blog reviews are too long.
Kate Coombs has a very detailed post at Book Aunt about books that are currently popular with kids. After discussing many of the usual suspects, she says: "I'll conclude my report on the coolest of the cool. It's kind of like watching the popular kids at school. Sometimes you wonder why they're popular when they seem so ordinary, or even, in some cases, so unappealing. On the other hand, there are times it makes sense. Some of the popular kids are truly extraordinary, and their singular status seems completely deserved."
Quick hits:
- Gail Gauthier linked from Original Content to an article recommending 50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men. I personally found the list a bit classics-heavy, but there are certainly some good suggestions. And I like the article's slant that "reading books is manly."
- Playing by the Book shares a list of picture books about trucks, prepared by Lynn from Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile. The article also includes Playing by the Book's favorite truck songs.
- The Book Dads have a nice reading list on fathers and adoption.
- Mitali Perkins highlights 15 new young adult titles featuring forgiveness.
- Sarah Mulhern has a new installment of her "hot books in my middle school classroom" series at The Reading Zone.
- Charlotte has started a regular Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy Round-Up at Charlotte's Library. The latest installment is here. She says: "please leave me a comment if I've missed yours, and I will add it to the list!"
- This week's Poetry Friday Round-Up was at The Drift Record. Last week's was at Gotta Book. This week's Nonfiction Monday Round-Up was at Tales from the Rushmore Kid.
- Donalyn Miller suggests that Book Whisperer readers work to get themselves out of their reading ruts. She also shares her recent positive experience in getting her students out of their reading ruts.
- At Just One More Book! Mark Blevis shares the "warrior theme" audio that he made for his wife, Andrea Ross, with good wishes from "a host of authors, illustrators, librarians and publishers from around the world (including England, Spain and Israel)". I'm happy to join all of them in wishing Andrea the best in her battle against breast cancer.
- Speaking of cancer-fighting kidlit bloggers, Jone MacCulloch shares news at Check It Out about a second fundraising auction for Bridget Zinn, who is fighting colon cancer.
- As usual, you can find additional links at Abby (the) Librarians' November 20th Around the Interwebs, Book Dads' November 15th Weekend Wander, and last week's End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup from Paul at Omnivoracious. Not to mention various Fuse News posts at A Fuse #8 Production, of course. And there's a new player in the link roundup fray. Travis from 100 Scope Notes has started a new regular feature called Morning Notes. He has gorgeous headlines, and a nice combination of quirky and insightful selections. Great stuff!
That's all for today. It's nice to be feeling a bit more caught up on my reader, I'll tell you that. More soon...
© 2009 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. All Amazon links in this post are affiliate links, and may result in my receiving a small commission on purchases (with no additional cost to you).
Thanks for the link! I've gotten some good responses from that post.
Hope you feel better soon.
Posted by: Maureen | November 23, 2009 at 09:43 PM
You are very welcome, Maureen. I really enjoyed the post. And thanks for the health wishes. I'm trying to take it relatively easy - fortunately it's a quiet week.
Posted by: Jen Robinson | November 24, 2009 at 10:30 AM
Hi Jen,
Thanks so much for linking to me. If you would like to prepare a list of books for a future Fantastic Fiction for Kids post, I'd be so pleased to have you on board - all the details are available at
http://www.playingbythebook.net/fantastic-fiction-for-kids/.
In a couple of week's time James Mayhew (author of "Katie's picture show" etc) is contributing a list, and I'm particularly excited about that! So yes, please do get in touch if you would like to contribute :-)
Posted by: Zoe | November 27, 2009 at 04:58 AM
You're very welcome, Zoe. And thanks for the invitation. I'm afraid that I'm spread too thin between my blog and Booklights these days, so I'm not able to put together a list for you. But I think it's a great series, and I'll be reading other people's contributions!
Posted by: Jen Robinson | November 27, 2009 at 12:17 PM